When I first saw the cover for BloodRayne I was somewhat mortified. It looks like someone has tried to combine Buffy, Lara Croft and Blade into one person.

BloodRayne is a Dhampir – a half breed of vampire who has many of the abilities of a vampire with fewer of the weaknesses. Not only that, but she has vibrant red hair, the body of a supermodel (but with larger breasts) and wears a funky black and red leather outfit, complete with stiletto boots.

The year is 1932 and BloodRayne is a special agent with a group called The Brimstone Society, who make it their business to protect humanity from supernatural threats by hunting down and killing them. The game begins as BloodRayne is assigned to hunt down a man who has, for several years, been hunting down occult artefacts to help bring Nazi Germany into a new age of domination. It is your mission to follow the trail of this man and his main henchmen through several stages, starting at a graveyard and progressing through several Nazi castles. Sound cheesy? You bet it is. But once you start playing the game, you'll get past the cheesiness and clichés are realise they are actually a lot of fun.

The first thing that strikes about this game is the graphics. The graphics are quite stylishly done and serve to enhance the mood considerably. They seem to balance quite well between being vibrant, and also being dark to suit the themes of the game. This is especially pleasing considering that this is a multi platform game – this is definitely no dodgy PS2 port and the developers have spent a good amount of time tweaking the graphics to use a good portion of the Xbox's capabilities. The lighting in particular is very well done. But probably the best part of the game's graphics is the gore. When you make a kill, blood and guts will splatter in random directions with great detail and realism. As you slice and dice your way through enemies the ground will become soaked in blood and when you carve up several enemies at once it is a virtual bloodbath. It looks much like a scene from the movie Braindead. It gives you a great sense of accomplishment. You are also able to damage or destroy most of the things you come across – paintings, vases, statues, chairs – pretty much everything except the actual walls, doors etc.

The character animation is quite smooth and realistic, with great detailed touches such as her hair gently waving as she moves, and of course certain other body parts also bob around gently. She performs several types of jumps in different directions that are well animated and look quite cool. There are some parts where the physics don't work quite as well, particularly when going up or down stairs, but on the whole it seems like you are controlling a real person. And a sexy one at that – if you are the kind of person who loves a bit of eye candy in your gaming, you certainly won't be disappointed with BloodRayne.

The sound is nothing particularly special, with fairly stock standard gun and slicing sounds. BloodRayne is mostly silent, but occasionally will give deliver a one-liner quip a'la Buffy style, only without the finesse or the humour. The clips of speech that she does say are repeated often and can be quite irritating after a while, so it is lucky that she doesn't talk all that much. There is a certain amount of dialogue in the cut scenes and the voice acting is somewhat typical of console games – not particularly good but not overly bad either. There is also a fair amount of swearing, which mostly serves to amuse, especially the first time you hear it as it's quite unexpected.

The music blends into the background well, to the point where you hardly notice that it is there, which I think in gaming is a positive thing as it shows the music is suitable. There are no options for a custom soundtrack.

It is the gameplay that really helps to set this game apart, thanks to a few special features, and although separately the features have been done before in other games, together they give the game a real boost. The most impressive is the ‘bullet time' mode, which is gained after you kill the first boss, and allows you to put the game into slow motion and dodge bullets. This is very similar to the bullet time in Max Payne, however unlike Max Payne there is no time limit on it. If you wished, you could play almost the entire game in slow motion. This is especially handy when facing bosses or large groups of monsters as it allows you to plan a strategy and really get stuck into it.

BloodRayne also has some other cool features. Her main weapons are a pair of large steel blades that are permanently attached to her wrists, and even when you have picked up guns you are still able to use these without having to swap by simply using the left trigger. As you progress through the game, you gain new blade attacks that become faster and deadlier. You can also use various guns that you find along the way. She can hold 2 guns at a time, and will automatically point them in the right direction when you move past an enemy. This way, you can either have both guns aimed at one enemy, or have the guns aimed at different enemies. It can take a bit of manoeuvring to get her to point the guns in the direction you want but this becomes easier as you get used to it. There is some weapon selection involved – basically you choose between heavy or light guns depending on the situation but you can't specifically pick the gun that you want to use.

BloodRayne's other weapon is blood sucking. Sucking blood will kill your enemy, and at the same time refill your health. To do this you can either simply jump on your target, or she also has a harpoon where you can target an enemy and hurl them towards you to suck on their neck.

As you kill enemies, a special meter is filled, and when it reaches full you are able to send BloodRayne into a "Blood Rage” state, where you are able to slow down the action and do massive damage for a short period. She also has a special vision mode that allows you to see through walls or spot far off enemies.

The enemy AI is generally quite well done and reflects the type of enemy you are facing. For example the zombies are fairly dumb, but the nazi soldiers actually provide a challenge, and some can even use your own weapons against you and call for reinforcements. There are however some parts that are just too hard. For instance, the boss at the end of the first level (a giant spider) requires a huge amount of damage to die. I was cursing at the screen for a good half hour before I finally caved in and used a cheat, just so I could get past that level. After that, although there were some very challenging parts, I was able to get through the rest of the game on normal difficulty without having to resort to using a cheat.

The most frustrating parts come with finding your way around the levels as there is no map to refer to and you often have to go to several places in a level. To add to this frustration, you are only able to save the game at the beginning of the level. While this is good in some ways it makes you take more care not to get killed – it can be very frustrating when you hit the same brick wall over and over again, and have to continually start over. You will probably find yourself throwing down your controller in frustration in at least one point of the game!

It's also disappointing that you have little control over the use of her slashing – when you slash an enemy it is generally in a pre-defined way based on your current skill level. As well as this, sometimes the blades don't really seem to connect with the enemy but the gore remains, so it sometimes seems a little odd.

The controls are fairly standard for a third person shooter – left stick to move around and the right stick to control both the direction and the camera. This second control can be a little weak at times, however it doesn't interfere with gameplay all that often. Like most third person games the camera gets a little annoying in tight spaces but on the whole, does the job reasonably well.